Ranger

Elise went back to Portland.

She told me over that breakfast that she had come up on that permit because she had been going through a divorce and wanted to spend a night somewhere that was hard to reach and that she had not expected what happened and that she did not regret coming.

She said it had reminded her that she was the kind of person who could pick up a knife off the floor of a shelter at 9,400 feet and know what to do with it.

She said she had not been sure of that for a long time.

I told her I had been glad she was there.

I meant it.

I'll tell you the thing I think about most, and then I'll let you go.

It is not the fight.

It is not the stitches.

It is not Dale's eyes when he came up off the bunk, which I did think about for the first year, and have mostly let go of since.

It is a thing that happened earlier in the evening, before I knew anything.

When we were sitting around eating stew and he was telling us about his brother, who had died of cancer.

He was lying, I know that now.

His brother was invented.

Dale Riley had two sisters and no brothers.

The story he told about the two of them hiking in the 80s, about the pump at the old station, about the rerouted trail, was stitched together from pieces of his own life that he had adapted into a cover.

I know this because investigators went through his camps and found notebooks in which he had practiced versions of the Clark Morrison story and several other stories.

He had rehearsed.

He had prepared.

But when he said the thing about his brother dying of cancer, his voice caught.